The Weekly Standard reserves the right to use your email for internal use only. Occasionally,
we may send you special offers or communications from carefully selected advertisers we believe may be of benefit to our subscribers.
Click the box to be included in these third party offers. We respect your privacy and will never rent or sell your email.

Please include me in third party offers.

State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley was asked for his thoughts on Bradley Manning's imprisonment. Here's the exchange, reportedly:

[O]ne young man said he wanted to address “the elephant in the room”. What did Crowley think, he asked, about Wikileaks? About the United States, in his words, “torturing a prisoner in a military brig”? Crowley didn’t stop to think. What’s being done to Bradley Manning by my colleagues at the Department of Defense “is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” He paused. “None the less Bradley Manning is in the right place”. And he went on lengthening his answer, explaining why in Washington’s view, “there is sometimes a need for secrets… for diplomatic progress to be made”.

Manning is, of course, the man who is accused of leaking a mass of documents to WikiLeaks, which embarrassed and hurt the State Department, and put troops in harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It doesn't seem to matter to Crowley that, as John McCormack reported, Manning actually seems to be getting rather good treatment. "Manning only gets access to basic local TV for one to three hours on weekdays and three to six hours on weekends; only gets two hours and twenty minutes a day to write correspondence; only has access to one magazine or book at a time; only gets one hour of exercise a day; only gets to meet with visitors for three hours a day on weekends and holidays," McCormack reported.